1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a food processor, and particularly to a food processor for processing food such as meat, vegetables and fruits by cutting, stirring, mixing and other food processing operations.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In a food processor, food to be processed, for example, meat, vegetables or fruits, is entered into a container so as to be subject to processing such as cutting and other operations by means of a rotor including, for example cutting blades, provided in the container. Such a food processor requires operating control such as speed control or operation time control of a rotor. An example of a conventional speed control is disclosed in the official gazette of Japanese Patent Laying-Open No. 1825/1980, for example. This gazette discloses a technique of speed control performed by the control of thyristors or triacs with variable operations of a rheostat, or by the conversion of turns of the field winding of a motor. However, for making the conversion of turns of the field winding of a motor, the size of a motor per se will have to be enlarged in some cases due to the number of turns, which will also enlarge the size of a food processor. On the other hand, an example of the control of operation time is disclosed, for example, in the official gazette of Japanese Patent Publication No. 34903/1973, where a technique of controlling operation time by means of time switches of electrical type or of mechanical type such as spring type is indicated. However, in case of using a mechanical time switch, such a time switch has a large size and the positioning thereof in a food processor will have to be limited in space, and in addition, the movable portion of a mechanical time switch is readily influenced by the environmental circumstances, causing lack of reliability. Furthermore, we may consider a food processor combining both of such speed control means and operation control means, but in such a food processor, if a rotor is once rotated and a time switch is turned off, it is necessary to newly set the time switch in order to rotate again the rotor in the same condition. In addition, ordinarily in using a food processor, it is sometimes needed to make control for gradually increasing the speed of the rotor, but in such a case, the rotational speed of the rotor has to be newly set each time, which is much inconvenient.
An example of a food processor improved in view of the above described disadvantages is disclosed in the official gazette of Japanese Patent Publication No. 28575/1982, which indicates a food processor wherein the speed data and the operation time data are selected by key switch groups and the selected data are stored in a random-access memory so that a motor for rotating the processor rotor is controlled based on the stored data. However, in such a food processor, only a single food preparation process is written in a random-access memory and read out so as to be used for the control of a motor, and in order to process a material with another process, it is necessary to write new data in the memory. Thus, in the above described food processor, the user must input food preparation data each time in accordance with the necessary food preparation process, which is extremely inconvenient.
Accordingly, it has been desired to make a food processor wherein various kinds of standard food preparation data are stored in a memory and a user selects the necessary data out of the stored data so that various materials can be automatically processed.